5 Lessons From the Uplifting Chilean Mine Rescue

All 33 miners have been rescued from the San Jose mine in Chile and given a clean bill of health.
It was a fantastic feat of ingenuity and perseverance. Of course, like
any headline grabber, there are different takeaways coming from
different pundits. Here are five of the lessons being drawn from the heroic rescue:

The
message coming out of the Tea Party people, and lot of them are good
people, is every man for himself, basically. "No more taxes, no more
government, no more everything. No more safety net. No more health care
for everybody. Everybody just get out there, make your buck, save it,
screw the government, move on." ...You know these people, if they were
every man for himself down in that mine they wouldn't have gotten out.
They would have been killing each other after about two days.

This
is a story of how people can work together, the people who were down
there for two months. The people who were above ground from all over the
world, using state of the art equipment not to get rid of the need for
manpower but to save manpower in this case.

If
those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago
anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25
years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?
Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is
the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock
Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. ...

Longer
answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like
Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed
by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they
innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do
more innovation.This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that
Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop
that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible,
fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world
above.

God Saved the Miners, says Mario Sepulveda, one of the rescued miners speaking to CNN:

During the time he was trapped inside the mine, Sepulveda said, he saw both good and evil.

"I
was with God, and I was with the devil. They fought, and God won," he
said. Sepulveda said he grabbed God's hand and never doubted that he
would be rescued.

Different
churches are laying claim to inspiring divine intervention in the
remarkable rescue, giving short shrift to the impressive technological
achievement of the Chilean engineers (and a giant U.S.-made drill) in
their efforts to get a leg up on the competition for souls in South
America's newly diverse religious marketplace.

"God has spoken
to me clearly and guided my hand each step of the rescue," said Carlos
Parra Diaz, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor at the San Jose Mine in
Chile's mountainous Atacama Desert. "He wanted the miners to be rescued
and I am His instrument."

A Pentecostal and an
evangelical pastor also worked the site, and American evangelicals with
the Orlando-based Campus Crusade for Christ sent each of the miners an
MP3 player containing the entire New Testament and "The Story of Jesus,"
the audio adaptation of the famous "Jesus Film."

...when
contact was made with the miners, they also requested that statues of
the Virgin Mary and the saints and religious pictures be sent down, in
addition to a crucifix... And the miners all signed a flag that was
ferried up and sent to Pope Benedict XVI in Rome.

The Chile experience has been a ray of light for NASA, whose people may
feel they sometimes are trapped in darkness themselves. While the
agency has expertise that helped in the mining drama -- for instance,
how to take care of people in confined places (like astronauts) -- its
primary mission (where to send those astronauts next) has been muddled,
the subject of acrimonious debate between the Obama administration and
members of Congress.

Experts say NASA can be very, very
effective when its mission is clear. ...

But since the glory days of
Apollo, the space program has struggled to find clear goals for its
astronauts. Their future has been hotly debated this year -- one reason a
success in Chile has been so welcome.